From Insouciance in Deliberation (1899):
To really deliberate, that is, to vividly imagine oneself persisting into one future, adjusting that mysterious stew of antecedent beliefs and evaluative biases (which may, of course, just be two Gestalten of the very same essence) in such a way that the resultant future “self” is one wants to assume is one’s “own,” and then to do the same sort of exercise with the alternative futures, one simply cannot care. It’s not just that one cannot care about which future outcome ends up being action-guiding—one cannot care about there being any outcome at all. We are exhorted to deliberate when things matter, not to “rush into the rush of the river” (as the old Ruthenian saying goes). But this is impossible. We can only deliberate about things that we have no reason to think matter to anyone. … What to do?
